The Welsh Church 2- Electric Boogaloo (Hunting the oldest queer terms in Welsh)

 The Welsh Church 2- Electric Boogaloo (Hunting the oldest queer terms in Welsh)

(or, 453 years is too long to keep calling us this)

(Consider supporting me on my ko-fi here or my etsy here if you are able) 

(CW: homophobic slurs in Welsh and English) 

In my last essay about the homophobia and transphobia embedded in the Welsh Church (or Church in Wales) I wrote about the homophobic lines in Leviticus 18:22 and how there has been no edition of the Welsh Bible that does not have the homophobic implications of those lines. It got me thinking, what about the other, more dubious lines in the Bible that contain homophobia or even transphobia? And did this get extended into Welsh? 

I began by gathering together all of the lines in the Bible known to be homophobic or justify homophobia. They are: Leviticus (Lefiticus) 18:22, Leviticus (Lefiticus) 20:13, 1 Corinthians (Corinthiaid) 6:9-10, 1 Kings (Brenhinoedd) 14:24, 1 Kings (Brenhinoedd) 15:12. In the King James Bible (in order as above) they read: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination”, “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them”, “Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind”, “And there were also sodomites in the land: and they did according to all the abominations of the nations which the Lord cast out before the children of Israel”, “And he took away the sodomites out of the land, and removed all the idols that his fathers had made”.

With this, I began to search the 1588 Welsh Bible online for the corresponding passages. Starting with Kings 1, I was unable to see the lines. I find this rather odd, as I’m fairly certain that the whole of the book was there. Nevertheless, I read on. I had more luck with Leviticus, finding 18:22 to read “Ac na orwedd gyd a gwryw, fel gorwedd gyd a benyw, fficidod [yw] hynny”. 20:13 yielded “A’m y gwr yr hwn a orwedd gyd a gwr, fel gorwedd gyd a gwraig, ffieidd-dra a wnaethant ill dau, lladder hwynt yn feirw, eu gwaed [fydd] arnynt eu hunain”. Corinthians 1, 6:9 producing the lines “Dni ŵyddoch chwi, na chaiff y rhai anghyffiawn etifeddu teyrnas Dduw: Na thwyller chwi: ni chaiff na godinebwŷr, nac eulyn addolwŷr, na thorwŷr priodas, na drythyll-wŷr, na’r rhai Sodomiaidd”. 

There. There’s the line. With that edition of the Welsh Bible in 1588 came also, one of Welsh’s earliest terms (and slurs) for gay people: “Sodomiaidd”. Of course, it’s a research topic for another day to see if it was used colloquially before that, or that this was a brand new coining (or rather, adaptation) into Welsh.

Pressing onwards, these lines have got to be codified somewhere else than the original source and if my blog can be that place, then it will. 

This leaves us with the New Testament of 1567 (also called the Salesbury edition), for which we can only compare the lines in Corinthians 1, due to the absence of the Old Testament in this edition. The text is organised without the clearest of markers for each verse, but pen. vi 249 starts at “Na thwyller chwi: ac nyd godinebwyr, na delw-addolwyr na’r ei doro-priodas, na’r ei drythyll, na gwryw-gydwyr”

The 1567 New Testament seems to have “gwryw-gydwyr” instead of “Sodomiaidd”, predating the latter as the first term (realistically, slur) for gay people in Welsh. According to the research that I’ve been doing for my LGBTQ+ dictionary project, Llyfr Enfys Fach, as well as the information available in Queering Glamorgan (2018) Shopland and Leeworthy, this term appears to correspond to other versions of the word. “Gwrywgydiad”,”gwrywgyd” “gwrywgydiaf” and “gwrywgydiwr” are various forms of this ancient synonym for sodomy. It may be worth noting that the 1567 New Testament is written in North Welsh and the 1588 Bible in South Welsh, but on the whole, it looks like there may be a precedent set either by this text, or one earlier that cemented “gwryw-gydwyr” as the oldest gay slur in Welsh. 

However, something more alarming (those of you who saw my raw data on a selection of modern dictionaries will know) is that “gwryw-gydwr” (and its many forms) is still listed in dictionaries today as the term for a gay or homosexual person. Some of these dictionaries are also learners' dictionaries! There is no way I alone could comprehensively check every single Welsh dictionary, bilingual or no, but the data I do have so far is extremely troubling, dear reader. 

To present this in a way which is a parallel, it would be like modern English dictionaries not displaying the word ‘gay’ for queer attraction to the same gender, but displaying ‘sodomite’ instead. This at once feels offensive, and yet, so ingrained in Welsh that we simply don’t think about how the Welsh LGBTQ+ community is being let down by this continuing to happen. Oddly, the oldest book I have data for, a Collins Spurrell Welsh Dictionary from the 1980s, lists only ‘hoyw’. Whereas the Welsh-English English-Welsh Dictionary By D. Geraint Lewis, Waverly Books , published in 2018, lists “gwrywgydiwr” alongside “cyfunrhywiol” and “hoyw”. Only one dictionary, the Geiriadur Newydd from 2016 lists the term with the note that it is considered offensive. Of the remaining twelve dictionaries I’ve been able to log so far, seven other dictionaries contain some form of “gwryw-gydwr”. That’s a massive nine out of the fifteen books I’ve looked through in total that are still using sodomite as an acceptable term for gay people. Their date ranges aren’t in the distant past either, the dictionaries which contain the slur are: two from 1993, one from 2000, two from 2007, one from 2008, two from 2016 and one from 2018. 

To close off this little segment, it is unequivocally clear that something needs to be done in order to better serve the Welsh LGBTQ+ community, speakers or not, nobody deserves to be referred to with a slur. It is my view that the Church in Wales is at least partly responsible for popularising ‘gwryw-gydwr’ as a term by which gay people are to be referred to with. And through this homophobic usage, created Wales’ very first gay slur. 

• (Page numbers for 1588 Bible e-reader: 110, 111, 1037) (For New Testament of 1587: 550)

•  Queering Glamorgan (2018) Shopland and Leeworthy